A lack of consumer education, long, drawn out underwriting processes and widespread misconceptions around life insurance have provided significant headwind for credit unions seeking to provide members with important life insurance protection.
But with September being dubbed “Life Insurance Awareness Month” by The Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education (Life Happens), this month presents credit unions with an opportunity to re-evaluate how they offer life insurance to make sure the product is generating income and adding value for members.
Here are three techniques to revamp the way your credit union offers life insurance products:
1. Sell products where your members go: Online.
The Internet of Things has created an entirely new platform for credit unions to offer life insurance products to their members. Considering credit union branch foot traffic is on the decline, it doesn’t make sense to only offer life insurance via licensed agents within the brick and mortar locations.
Advances in life insurance “quote and apply” technology now allow members to quickly and simply receive a cost estimate for life insurance online. From there, they can complete an application right from your website! While building out these capabilities may seem like a time consuming and costly endeavor, a credit union’s life insurance partner typically shoulders most of the burden of working with your marketing and compliance resources to offer product customization and support.
2. Understand and embrace accelerated underwriting.
Over the next several years, life insurance companies will begin to adopt accelerated underwriting techniques that aggregate consumer lifestyle data from places like LexisNexis, pharmaceutical companies and motor vehicle agencies to compile an applicant risk profile. With these capabilities, the underwriting period will be dramatically shortened and the applicant will be able to skip invasive medical exams that typically come with purchasing life insurance.
Accelerated underwriting will allow insurance companies to issue a policy within minutes or days, as opposed to weeks. Even applicants with complicated medical histories will likely receive a policy faster than they would through the traditional underwriting process because of the amount of data already collected on them. With this revolutionary development in place, credit union members will likely be much more receptive to pursuing life insurance offerings.
3. Leverage the marketing expertise of your life insurance partner.
A critical piece in successfully offering life insurance is the ability to promote the product to members on a regular basis. Few credit unions take advantage of their life insurance partner’s capabilities to fine-tune their marketing efforts. Insurance companies can help by creating web portals for online sales and work with your existing credit union marketing calendar to map out life insurance marketing efforts, like website banner ads and newsletter distributions.
Life insurance meets a critical need of your core middle-income members. While Life Insurance Awareness Month is a good prompt to re-evaluate your work with this important product, making a consistent, visible effort year-round will add value to your members and generate income for your credit union!
Craig Simms is SVP for Vantis Life Insurance Company. He can be reached at 860-298-6005 or csimms@vantislife.com.
